14 ms·
It's easier/less deltaV to send things out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun. (Basically, to hit the sun, you have to scrub out all/most of the vel
by wiredfool 10y ago
It's easier/less deltaV to send things out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun.
(Basically, to hit the sun, you have to scrub out all/most of the velocity from the Earth's orbit, or what you've done is put your waste in an orbit around the Sun that may intersect the Earth's at some point in the future)
- mac01021 10y agoIt isn't sufficient to launch in the general direction of the sun, using the minimum energy required to escape earth's gravity?
- cmrx64 10y agoNo. For an entertaining explanation why, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNS6VKNXY6s
- gus_massa 10y agoObligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1244/ https://xkcd.com/1244/ (explanation and more details https://explainxkcd.com/1244/ https://explainxkcd.com/1244/ )
- Symmetry 10y agoThe reason the Earth doesn't fall into the sun is that it's moving quickly enough that the centripetal force balances the Sun's gravity. If you escape the Earth's gravity well and give it a small push it would still have nearly as much orbital energy as the Earth and way more than Venus, which hadn't fallen into the sun either. To slow down enough that you could fall into the sun you need to kill 30 km/s of velocity. To go fast enough to escape the solar system you only need about 15 km/s. And crashing into Jupiter is even cheaper than that.
- mrfusion 10y agoWhy not do an elliptical orbit that takes you close enough to the sun to burn up? That seems like less energy than dropping to zero no?
- adwn 10y agoAn elliptical orbit that gets close to the sun is nearly the same as an orbit that goes through the sun. Besides, exposing radioactive materials to heat does not affect their radioactivity.
- msandford 10y agoThat's only true up to a point. I suspect that if you exposed just about anything to 100,000 kelvin it ceased to look like any kind of matter we know anything about.
- adwn 10y ago> I suspect that if you exposed just about anything to 100,000 kelvin it ceased to look like any kind of matter we know anything about. 1e5 K? You're missing a couple orders of magnitude, there. The hottest parts of the Sun's surface go up to 20 million Kelvin, and that doesn't "cease to look like any kind of matter we know anything about".
- msandford 10y agoYes, but there is SOME temperature at which heating things up does start to cause things to act weirdly. You know, like in a fusion reactor. That definitely changes the radioactivity of certain elements.
- mikeash 10y agoThis experiment was performed thousands of times back in the 1950s and 1960s. A nuclear weapon's fireball is way hotter than 100,000K, and the exploding weapon contains lots of fissionable material and fission byproducts. The extreme temperatures don't destroy them, they just help spread it around.
- msandford 10y agoYup, you got me there. Speculating wildly ends poorly.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoTechnically you could try some clever gravity assists with Jupiter to greatly reduce the ∆v requirements. But that's still a very expensive way of solving a non-problem. We know how to deal with nuclear waste. The problem is with people being scared out of proportion by it.